Sign the Petition to

We request that you stop selling meat from animals raised with routine subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics. Consumers aren't aware of how animals are treated by the industrial farms that supply the meat that you sell. If you care about the health of your customers, the treatment of animals, and negative impacts on the environment, please commit to exclusively purchasing meat from operations where important medicines are only given to heal sick animals.

Signed,

Dan Imhoff

This petition closed about 2 years ago

How this will help

Factory farms rely on frequent low doses of antibiotics to cram cattle, hogs, and chickens in unhygienic and unnatural living conditions. By allowing its suppliers to abuse antibiotics simply to...

Factory farms rely on frequent low doses of antibiotics to cram cattle, hogs, and chickens in unhygienic and unnatural living conditions. By allowing its suppliers to abuse antibiotics simply to produce cheap meat, Walmart is supporting the eradication of medically important antibiotics that could save your life—and the lives of your loved ones.

Most Walmart meat suppliers fatten their livestock in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where tens of thousands of animals are confined inside cramped and stressful conditions to maximize productivity and profits. Keeping so many animals in such close contact provides the perfect breeding ground for some very dangerous diseases to develop and mutate.

Instead of taking steps to improve living conditions, factory farms feed their animals low doses of non-medically necessary antibiotics. Drugs are added in feed or water—whether or not animals are sick and need them. The United States uses more antibiotics per pound of meat produced than any other nation.

Routine exposure to small doses of antibiotics eventually make disease organisms like E. coli and Salmonella resistant to the drugs. What's worse, these are the same types of drugs necessary to treat people when they are sick. If we are then exposed to these new antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," there's a real risk the drugs we previously relied on to kill the disease will no longer work. This means if you get sick, antibiotics might no longer make you better, and we're seeing this happen already.

Doctors and public health experts are already calling the rise of superbugs, and the end of effective antibiotics, a critical public health crisis. According to a new report from the Center for Disease Control, "much of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary and inappropriate and makes everyone less safe." We're calling on Walmart to end this abuse by ensuring its meat suppliers only use antibiotics to treat sick and injured animals.

Walmart proudly states that it has quality standards that are verified across the globe. As the nation's largest retailer, Walmart could end the indiscriminate abuse of antibiotics on factory farms with one stroke of the pen. But they won't do it unless we all demand it. Please sign this petition and call on Walmart to safeguard these critical drugs. The future health of our planet and of ourselves is at stake.